1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to document component management and publishing and, more particularly, document components for generating complete individual documents and packages of documents for each of a number of individuals or entities and publishing such documents tailored for each intended individual or entity. The present invention also relates to a workflow controlled authoring and publishing process.
2. Background Description
Enterprises face challenging document management problems in today's publishing environment. The challenges are spread over several areas of creating and publishing a document. These areas include generating personalized (customized) documents for a particular entity or condition, managing document components, (e.g., sections of document text or graphics) that are utilized as a part of hundreds or thousands of different document types within an organization, making certain that output for various media (i.e., paper, CD, Internet, etc.) is consistent with regard to content and styling (“look and feel”) for all documents produced by the enterprise and archiving these documents for audit and retrieval purposes.
Generic, or non-personalized/customized, documents can often be generated by assembling base document components or utilizing a base document template for document production. However, for large enterprises or companies working with complicated documents, documents often must be personalized or customized based upon various conditions that may or may not apply to each particular document. Examples of these condition types are state or federal regulations that mandate certain disclosures or statements be contained in specific places (and with specific styling) within a document, differing transaction types that require specialized language, and the insertion of specific data in order to personalize a particular document (e.g., recipient name and address or transaction specific information applicable to that one document).
Many organizations attempt to manage their document production using a series of templates which form the base for each document type that they are required to produce. This often entails a team of employees managing the templates and manually editing each document to personalize or customize them with transaction specific information. In addition, the templates often contain sizeable amounts of text or graphics that are re-used in one or more other documents. This re-used text could be as small as a word or a company logo, or as large as a multi-page section of text. These components are the lowest common denominator of document text for an organization. One of the significant problems with template management is that maintenance of the re-used text throughout the templates is often a burdensome task. When a heavily re-used component needs to be modified, users may be required to search through thousands of document templates in order to find and update all instances of the component. This process is resource intensive and prone to errors.
Consequently, there is a need for a document component management tool that manages document components for document production, rather than managing templates. In addition, there is a need for a system that can personalize and customize documents in an automated fashion based upon client specific business rules free from human intervention and management of the document creation and publishing process, improving document publishing efficiency.